It’s funny, but I met Kyle King in a professional context within a day or two of reading his blog for the first time. At some point while we were working on a transaction, the subject of Georgia football came up (that’s not nearly as unusual as you might think in my work) and Kyle let on that he was a blogger. I told him that I’d read his work and enjoyed it; he seemed pleased by that and in fact mentioned it on his blog a couple of days later.

It turned out that he was one of the inspirations I had in starting a blog of my own. I figured that if one married, practicing lawyer could start a fan blog centered on Georgia athletics, so could I. I was right, luckily.

It’s a lot of fun getting a blog like this, or one that’s turned into Dawg Sports, going. It’s also a lot of hard work. That’s not what makes fan blogging tough, though. It’s when what you’re doing feels like hard work that you’ve got a problem. So even though I’m not there, I certainly understand where Kyle is coming from with his announcement that he intends to withdraw from blogging in the next few weeks.

I just want to take a moment to thank him for what he’s done and wish him the best on where he’s going.

I sure hope this is a case of Terry indulging his inner Corrine Brown here…

“They’re looking for me to be like a Percy Harvin type of guy,” Terry said of the former Florida wide receiver who had more than 1,900 receiving yards and more than 1,800 rushing yards in college. “They don’t have a guy like me to where I can run the ball and I’m a wide receiver at the same time. Sometimes they’ve got to go to the defensive side and bring Brandon Boykin or Branden Smith over to the offensive field. Now that they have me, they don’t have to do all that. We’ll see, once I get healthy.”

… because if it turns out that Georgia coaches are using Percy Harvey as a selling tool, man, that’s just wrong.

Right now, this piece is in the lead for my best example of “… and, a pony” wishful thinking for 2013. And it’s only mid-January.

Sauer has labeled buyouts such as Auburn’s $7.5 million goodbye package given banished head coach Gene Chizik in November “shameful.” As the president of the North American Association of Sports Economists, he carefully tracks coach salary trends, which seem at odds with the academic mission of universities.

“We’re getting close to that, if we’re not already there,” said Sauer, 56.

He blames a “non-cooperative competitive equilibrium.”

The professor’s explanation: “Given the rules of the game, (Nick Saban) is getting paid roughly market value. The rules of the game are the problem. The demand is there to compete and to win, so you have to go out and compete to win, so that bids up the price for things.”

College head coach salaries wouldn’t be so out-of-control with a salary cap applied by the NCAA or conferences.

A Rice vs. Idaho national championship game is more likely.

“(Schools) can’t cooperate like the NFL because it would be illegal,” Sauer said. “The NCAA is cornered by competitive forces and anti-trust law. When the NCAA tried to put in rules which attempted to restrict pay to (basketball) assistants, they were sued and lost.”

Damn it! If only the courts weren’t so short-sighted, the schools could keep all that money that Jimmy Sexton is squeezing out of them they’re overpaying coaches and use it to… to… well, I don’t know. Maybe let Michael Adams invite a few more folks to a bowl game.

If a school doesn’t want to pay an absurd salary to a coach, nobody, not even Sexton, is holding a gun to its head forcing it to do so. That’s the marketplace at work. And eventually, if you make enough dumb decisions, you’ll be forced to cut back on your spending. Unless you’re Maryland, that is.

How can you not laugh at that pompous ass Jim Delany announcing a retreat from the “Legends” and “Leaders” nomenclature he assigned to his conference’s two divisions with great fanfare, what, a mere two or three years ago? His fee-fees are hurted:

“I’m not sure it was a national survey [of people who didn’t like the names], but people who hit the ‘send’ button,” Delany said. “I don’t take umbrage to negative reaction. I don’t necessarily change when I hear it. I think on the other hand, we said we would test-market it, and we have for a couple of years. We have the opportunity to look at it again. I’m sure we will. Whether or not we change or not is to be determined. I don’t have any presumption that we’ll change on it, but that doesn’t mean we’re not looking at it.

“I don’t think when you try to build something, lead some organization, you don’t want to be tone deaf. But it’s not up for vote every week.”

I bet if there was money in voting every week for that, he’d change his tune.

And, hey, this isn’t about SEC superiority. After all, we’re dealing with the geographic absurdity of a Missouri being plunked in the East. This is just about what money grubbing brings you. These guys will keep crapping on everything that makes the sport they control special because they can’t help themselves.

There’s only one explanation for a team with the nation’s 83rd best offense firing its coordinator and replacing him with the man who piloted the nation’s 118th best offense: Scot Loeffler is the poor man’s Lane Kiffin.